Oh my word, that was fast. Latino review, who also posted an early treat­ment of the Halo Movie back in the day, have posted up a sneak pre­view of the Gears of War movie adap­ta­tion. How much of this will appear in the final film remains to be seen, though it seems fairly rep­utable and Stu­art Beat­tie (Pirates of the Caribbean, Col­lat­eral) has done a good job. I’m going to say this now — this sto­ry­line will change before the film is released, likely when a direc­tor is assigned to the project and he begins assert­ing his vision.

The arti­cle at Latino is pretty long so I am going to pro­vide a sum­mary here. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a lit­tle tid­bit of news we missed, back in an inter­view in 2006 Hideo Kojima announced that he thought Lord of the Rings star, Viggo Mortensen, would be the per­fect role as Snake.

Hideo Kojima : ‘It’s going to be a Hol­ly­wood film. It won’t be that Ger­man direc­tor [Uwe Boll]. Viggo Mortensen would make a per­fect Snake, but maybe he’s a lit­tle too old. Metal Gear Solid, which was set in Alaska, would make a per­fect set­ting for the movie.’

Source: Jeux France

Despite the Halo Movie’s appar­ent pause, Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jack­son con­tinue to work together. The recently sur­faced “Cross­ing the Line” clip using the high tech Red 4k has been writ­ten and directed by the pair. Check it out at the Red user forums, down­load links at the bottom.

Also, look­ing for­ward to the Halo 3 pub­lic beta?

… and they asked him a lit­tle bit about the World of War­craft movie. Itzik Ben Bas­sat is the Vice Pres­i­dent of devel­op­ment and he says these few words:

There’s a World of War­craft Movie in the works, do you expect that to enjoy sim­i­lar suc­cess?
We’ve been work­ing on that movie for years! If peo­ple only knew how many years we put in to clos­ing this movie deal. We’re very happy with our progress though, it was really dif­fi­cult for us as a com­pany to find some we trusted to work with. With Leg­endary, well, they did Bat­man Returns and the new Super­man so we knew that was a com­pany we wanted to work with. Bring­ing War­craft to the movies is the next step for us, we want to let peo­ple bring World of War­craft into other aspects of their lives. After all, we’re com­pet­ing for people’s enter­tain­ment time, whether it’s lis­ten­ing to music watch­ing TV or going to the cin­ema. Our goal is to pro­vide the best enter­tain­ment out there.

Any news on when we can expect to see the film?
Hol­ly­wood has it’s own pace but we’re work­ing as hard as we can to push it forwards.

Check Empire for the full text.

Three con­cept images and a “logo treat­ment” were released to the pub­lic, the last of which looks might­ily impressive.

19 year old Aus­tralian Char­lie Clausen has been reported as the lead in the video game adap­ta­tion which could be his first big hol­ly­wood break. This report seems to have come from an Aus­tralian mag­a­zine called “Hyper”. IMDb cur­rently lists Clausen as attached and no con­fir­ma­tion of his role in the movie exists. How­ever many web­sites includ­ing IGN are stat­ing this as fact, which remains to be seen — some of his IMDb pro­file shots do bear a resem­blance to the Prince.

With­out a fiz­zle or a PoP for nigh on three years the project seemed almost dead. Or maybe it was just because of Jerry Bruckheimer’s busi­ness in a mul­ti­tude of suc­cess­ful pro­duc­tions, oh, take for instance the Pirates of the Caribbean tril­ogy (every­thing is a trilogy!).

But alas! In April 2007 we have some announce­ments. A direc­tor has been assigned — the man behind The Rock and Bad Boys, but also the Pearl Har­bor atroc­ity (just the film) — Michael Bay is set to direct; we can all judge for our­selves his present form when The Trans­form­ers movie lands this sum­mer. As a result, shoot­ing for this movie will be unlikely to com­mence until the Fall.

Shack­news also reports that Jef­frey Nach­manoff, screen­writer for  “The Day After Tomor­row”, is devel­op­ing “revi­sions” of Mechner’s script. Who knows where this could leave us — though the sto­ry­line is meant to be along the lines of “retain­ing the ele­ments of the evil vizier seek­ing to con­trol the sands of time, and the pres­ence of the princess-turned-sidekick Farah”.

With this news comes a pro­jected Sum­mer 2009 release date. 

As far back as 2004, Vari­ety reported that Jerry Bruck­heimer, world famous pro­ducer behind films such as Black Hawk Down and Pirates of the Caribbean, was nego­ti­at­ing a “seven fig­ure” deal to obtain the movie rights to Ubisoft’s Prince of Per­sia fran­chise — whilst the film itself would fall to Dis­ney to develop.

It was also reported that Jor­dan Mech­ner, behind the sto­ry­lines in the video games, would be work­ing on the scripts first drafts, with John August (Big Fish, Go) super­vis­ing and exec­u­tive pro­duc­ing. Mike Sten­son and Chad Oman are also exec­u­tive producers.

Those look­ing for a faith­ful adap­ta­tion of the fran­chise might be a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed, Mechner’s first quote states, “Rather than do a straight beat-for-beat adap­ta­tion of the new videogame, we’re tak­ing some cool ele­ments from the game and using them to craft a new story — much as ‘Pirates’ did with the theme park ride.”

Cool ele­ments sounds omi­nous. The arti­cle goes on to liken the Prince with Indi­ana Jones and the par­al­lels are clear; dun­geons, sand, the 9th cen­tury (oh wait). What was one of the last Disney/Bruckheimer part­ner­ships? The bril­liant (this is sar­casm) King Arthur.